Searching in Voyager: special characters and punctuation normalization

Question

How is punctuation (e.g. periods, ampersands, plus signs, etc.) treated when searching in Voyager?

Answer

Voyager normalizes punctuation in two different ways, depending on the type of search you're executing. In a keyword search, punctuation is removed from the query string and each occurrence is replaced by a space.

In a left-anchored search, punctuation is removed from the query string and replaced with nothing.

So "african-americans" would be normalized as "african americans" in a keyword search, and "african-americans" would be normalized as "africanamericans" in a left-anchored search. 

Special characters= -, &, +: The hyphen (-) is a space in both keyword and left-anchored searches. The ampersand (&) is a searchable character. The plus sign (+) is a searchable character.

• Article last edited: 27-Jul-2020